Normal Distributions and other Killing Machines (a post about systemic violence)

04 Feb, 2026

I posted the following to social media after reading the article on Monday:

Absolutely despicable. The disabled son of a man arrested by ICE has died because he could no longer receive the right care. ICE denied the father access to the funeral.

Fuck ICE.

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/arlington-family-ice-not-allow-father-attend-sons-funeral/3976341/

This is not an isolated tragedy. It is what happens when systems designed around averages collide with lives that exist in the tails.

I often talk about this in terms of normal distributions. Not because statistics are neutral or enlightening, but because they reveal something uncomfortable: “normal” is a decision, not a fact. Someone decides where the center of the curve is. Someone decides what range of variation is acceptable. And everything that falls too far from that center is quietly reclassified—from person to edge case.

Then build systems that privilege that center and allow excuses satisfice for theedge cases - for those people. Optimizing for the middle solves problems for people in bulk. It is efficient. It is scalable. It is legible to policy.

It is inhumane. And it is deadly at the edges.

Not everyone needs this level of care, so we do not design for it. This man’s son was not an anomaly in any meaningful sense. He was a single data point pushed far enough into the tail that the system stopped rendering him. His survival depended on a caregiver. The system that detained that caregiver had no way—procedurally, bureaucratically, morally—to represent what happens when that dependency is severed overnight.

This acceptance, this silent acquiescence, is rarely framed as violence. It hides behind thresholds, eligibility rules, jurisdictional seams, and forms that have no checkbox for “someone will die if you do this.” Responsibility is fragmented until it evaporates. Each individual action appears reasonable. The outcome is fatal anyway.

Systems do not usually kill through overt cruelty.
They kill through truncation.

We focus our actions on the majority, and in doing so, we compress the curve. The tails are trimmed. Supports disappear. Dependencies snap. When the local world changes—when a caregiver is detained, deported, or simply removed—the collapse is immediate and irreversible.

When we truncate the tails, we are not trimming outliers. We are severing lifelines. And when we do that, people die.

This is not a bug.
It is the math we chose to live by.

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• 15 Feb, 2026 I lost my theme's spine so brought it back. All hail CSS rotation.

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Footnotes

#disability #politics